Fighting Bill Lueders

Bill Lueders next to a cutout of The Progressive magazine’s founder, “Fighting” Bob La Follette.

Bill Lueders believes that The Progressive magazine, where he was just named editor, is the “best little political magazine in America.” And although he’s proud of the journalism it publishes, he says that the magazine isn’t shy about its biases.

“The Progressive exists to carry a torch for the progressive movement, the progress toward a fairer and more just society,” he says in the magazine’s office on the Capitol Square. “There are certain things we’re unabashed about like support for human rights, civil rights and LGBTQ rights. We’re not interested in pretending neutrality when it comes to fundamental principles. We’re against war, we’re against militarism. We’re against corporate domination of the political process.”

The stance against “corporate domination,” he notes, is “a direct line” back to “Fighting” Bob La Follette, the progressive firebrand, governor and U.S. senator who founded the magazine in 1909 as La Follette’s Weekly Magazine.

“We’re trying to defend the progressive traditions of Wisconsin,” Lueders adds. “We’re part of that vanguard that’s pushing back against these trends of voter suppression, partisan redistricting and bottomless campaign spending.”

A former Isthmus news editor and longtime contributor, Lueders first worked for The Progressive as an intern in 1984.

“It was a life-changing experience,” he says. “It introduced me to the art of editing and made me realize that’s what I wanted to do with my life — to see people take apart a story and redo it and make it so much better.”

Lueders was especially influenced by Erwin Knoll, who was The Progressive editor from 1973 until his death in 1994.

“Erwin was a pacifist, but he was the fiercest person I’ve ever known. He was just a tiger when it came to defending the things he cared about,” he says. “Erwin fled the Nazis as a child…. Members of his family were killed in the death camps. Yet he grew up to be someone who was an absolutist when it came to nonviolence and freedom of speech. He would have died to defend the right of Nazis to speak.”

Lueders returned to the magazine as an associate editor in 2015 and has been its managing editor since last year. He’s the eighth editor in 109 years.

His priority for the magazine is its survival. “It’s never been more relevant, more vital, and it’s never been more endangered,” he says. “We’re tens of thousands of dollars in debt. We’re in serious financial distress. We’re just barely hanging on.”

Although many journalism outlets saw subscription spikes after Donald Trump became president, The Progressive’s subscriptions have held steady at around 30,000.

“We have not seen a Trump bump,” he says. “We haven’t really had the money to do direct mail campaigns and other outreach that might allow us to capitalize on subscription [growth].”

His plan to keep the magazine going is to keep doing great journalism. Published every other month, the magazine has about two dozen articles in each issue. But it also publishes one or two articles a day on its website.

He also points to such writers as Mike Ervin, who writes a disability rights column, and Jeff Abbott, a Guatemala-based journalist writing dispatches from Latin America.

“The way we’re going to attract more subscribers is just to keep creating more great issues of the magazine,” he says. “It’s been just one really good issue after another. I think we’ve really upped our game.”

Much of it is geared toward illuminating the reality of the American left and its ideals.

“Trump and the Republicans and Fox News have created a perception of the left that to me is completely unrecognizable,” he says. “One of the valuable things we do is to provide a picture of the reality of the American political left, as opposed to the caricature that’s been created for malevolent purposes.”